“Have you any other counsel?” he asked.
The prisoner did not look up. He replied in a low, almost inaudible voice.
“No, Your Honor,” he said.
“Then I shall appoint some one to go on with the case,” and he looked up over the docket before him and out at the few attorneys sitting within the rail.
It was at this moment that the woman, crying silently, without a sound and without moving in her chair, heard behind her the voice which she had heard the evening before, when, as now, at the bottom of the pit, she stood before the shutter of the shop-window.
“Will it be necessary, monsieur le judge?”
It was the same wonderful, moving, heavenly voice. Every sound in the court-room suddenly ceased. All eyes were lifted. And Thompson, sitting beside the district-attorney, saw, standing before the rail in the court-room, the splendid, alluring creature that had called him out of the sordid lobby of the Hotel Markheim and entranced him with an evidence of her favor. Unconsciously he put up his hand to feel for the bud in the lapel of his coat. It had remained there—not, as it happened, from her wish, but because he dare not lay the coat aside.
In the interval of intense interest arising at the withdrawal of the attorney from the case the girl had come in unnoticed. She might have appeared out of the floor. Her voice was the first indication of her presence.
The judge turned swiftly. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean, monsieur,” she answered, “that if a man is innocent of a crime, he cannot require a lawyer to defend him.”